Street Fighter V Hitting The Streets On February 16th

You’ve got four months to build thumb callouses by tapping on walls, work on your speed and agility with shadowtapping, and build bone density destroying a bamboo stem with your phalanges, as Capcom have announced Street Fighter V [official site] is coming on February 16th, 2016. They’re also confirmed the stretchy Dhalsim is returning for the brawl, and spoken a bit more about their plans to keep adding new fighters in updates rather than new releases.

As we’ve mentioned before, Street Fighter V will not receive a SFV Ultra Edition, a SFV Turbo Ultra Edition, or a SFV Megaboost 2nd Revival. Instead, the changes that it traditionally used as foundations for new standalone releases will come as free updates, and the new characters they’d also bring will be released for the one and only SFV. New characters and costumes and whatnot will be available either with a virtuacurrency earned naturally while playing, or by paying real money (for another fake money) to skip that and unlock them instantly. The new bit: Capcom mentioned in yesterday’s announcement that:

“We have confirmed that we will be releasing 6 new characters post-launch in 2016, which will bring the total roster up to 22 characters by the beginning of 2017. On average, we will release one new character every two months, provided everything stays on track with our development schedule.”

They also go into a little detail on ways folks can earn the virtuacash by playing, such as hitting daily goals. Capcom say these “will also ensure that players with a limited amount of time to play per day can still earn characters for free. We want a system that rewards frequency of play, rather than requiring long marathon grinding sessions.” Capcom don’t give any idea how much you’d have to play to earn enough to unlock a character for ‘free’, though.

Folks polking around in data files from the recent PC beta have a few ideas about who some of those new characters might be.

Oh, and I’ll mention it again because it’s neat and you may have forgotten: SFV will support cross-platform play between Windows and PlayStation 4.

Now look at this man being stretchy and breathing fire, it’s quite pretty/unsettling: